“The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.” - William Gibson, Neuromancer

Gibson describes the static as metallic, silvery gray in an interview.

“The sky was the perfect untroubled blue of a television screen, tuned to a dead channel.” - Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere

I remember the white static myself.

Yo, empty your computer recycle bin / yeah can. That’s where the files are.

If you have a computer and graphics card you could try some local llms. They are pretty awesome and you get to keep your days. I use oobabooga and stable diffusion with Silly Tavern as the glue to hold it together. I get model cards from character Hub

deleted by creator

These are cute costumes!

What’s the costume? I’ll tell you real quick if it’s offensive. Go for it.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northrop_Grumman_X-47B Software from this project, I suspect, is being used to autonomously pilot these planes. I think this is an automated drone strike.

Well I look at it like this: I don’t really care that much personally about my friends mundane things, but I do care about mine. I think that there isn’t a reason for them to care about my mundane things, but I enjoy having my mundane things listened to. I like that reciprocity, so I made an effort to listen and ask questions that show I’m engaged in the conversation. I try to express empathy by saying when a situation sounds tough or fun. I have noticed that “showing up” for the conversation is what our friends want a lot of the time, and that’s what we want as well a lot of the time. I have also noticed that after a few sessions of “showing up”, I can actually get engaged and move beyond just showing up. I have a buddy who has a sick grandma, and the first few mentions of her I kinda had the same thoughts, like, I don’t care about this lady, why should I listen. I showed up anyways and it led to some interesting conversation about the nature of mental illness because she was remembering very vivid details from her past and that led to some interesting convos about all that. I think that being able to find the enjoyment in a small talk conversation is definitely a skill, but it is rewarding in both your interpersonal relationships and in learning new things through unexpected exposure to new concepts. As a fellow autist, I’m pretty information driven, but neurotypical people, I think, are more feelings driven. The small talk stuff is super important to them and they put that up front first, I guess to judge your character? I’m not sure why, but I have noticed better interactions after I have engaged in small talk. It really is a trainable skill and when you get good at small talk, it can be enjoyable!

Pihole runs on a 10-15 dollar computer (raspberry pi) and blocks anything you want, and is free as in freedom software. It is also zero cost.

Don’t know how to improve it. 10/10.

Beard wax the 'stache into the handlebar style. Use trimmers to keep the mustache away from your lip, directly above the lip line.

If I needed to say something in a two item list and wanted to say that the list could work either way, I would say something like,“meat and potatoes or potatoes and meat, either way” so I would be restating the list in the opposite order. But I also use the words vice versa. I just noticed that people say it when they want to sound smart. It’s not like it’s only said in order to sound smart. There are lots of phrases that are short, succinct, and have a very specific situation where they are applicable. These are the phrases that people have a tendency to use to punch up their sentences.

Milquetoast, vice versa, vice-sa versa (sic), erudite, illucidate, confusing size for importance (saying big meeting instead of important meeting), commensurate, je no se qua, anything in Latin, anything in another language, latent space, probability space. We use lots of techniques to try to punch-up our perceived intelligence, neurotypical people do it sometimes because they have a tendancy to associate station in a hierarchy with “good traits” like intelligence and use these smart sounding words to try to project authority… ? Maybe? Sometimes I use smart sounding words to talk over/around people when I don’t want to engage them for whatever reason. People after weird. I think it’s easy to see when people are dumber than you, and much harder to see when people are smarter that you; especially the degree to which (to which, being another smart sounding word particle. Particle when used to ike this, another smartness showing phrase.) they are smarter than you. My rule of thumb is that if someone’s dumb, that’s easy for you to tell, but if you can’t tell that they are blatantly dumb, they are likely to be at least close to you in intelligence. If they seem smart, they are likely smarter than your best case scenario guess (they are likely smarter than you think). Everything goes out the window when you start talking about people who learned English as not their first language. Also acronyms.

Creating designer pets is immoral. Creating a side channel market for abandoned designer pets is immoral because it increases demand for designer pets (people can abandon their pets knowing they will be cared for).

I think it would be a few months of Mortal Kombat on the off-roads to interstates and at all kinds of junctions as the assholes on the road fight each other to the death. After these guys (it’s always dudes) get out of the way, there will be a long period where statisticians say loudly over and over again that getting a licence before the age of 26 is the most dangerous thing a young man can do. They will run campaigns about it, with Republicans somehow convincing people that the safer thing to do would be to get the 16 year old boys in the country driving as quickly as possible. The higher up Republicans will be saying that the men who are getting into Mortal Kombat are the better drivers and that the ones that die are worse at driving and manning, so the roads are safer as a result of the Road Kombat Accord (RCA), especially for men, even more so for young men. The lower down Republicans will act like the RCA is a great honor to get to fight in and that Road Kombat is how our ancestors have done it for generations. Liberals will be sweating and wringing their hands while weakly citing the statisticians. The Republicans will Uno reverse this line of thinking into a no-brain slogan by the name of, “trust 'Ole Statty” so that liberals are afraid to tell people to look into the statistics for fear of getting told that they are in the pocket of 'Ole Statty. Republicans will tell liberals that they are in love with, “'Ole Holes”, glory holes that Ole Statty is said to frequent. Liberals will then get confused at this bizarre line of attack on their heterosexuality even though they don’t believe that homosexuality is negative or deviant and so all efforts to reverse the RCA will end. Most men would just sigh and not get their driving licenses until they turn 23, with the daring ones only waiting until 20. This would settle into a constant, relatively few, Road Kombats in the end; just a constant statistic of young white trash + minorites getting killed along with a bunch of 20-something’s. Most people end up assuming that the deaths were unavoidable and that there is no way to stop them. People state the stats as if they are the natural order. When people point out that the all-cause road deaths are lower in countries without Road Kombat, they will be treated as unpatriotic and ignored, becoming crackpots in the eyes of the many.

I prefer the 'ole $sudo dd -i /dev/random -o /dev/sda

Let’s take the opposite approach: look at all the top echelons of all past societies, assume that this subset of people was the most free to live in any way that they so desired, then count how many of these people did sex work. I think that we can safely assume that the amount of people that willingly engage in sex work is zero.

I am curious about this. Would you please discuss it further? I like the idea of mental models that can be used in useful ways, or programmed in some way. The method of loci comes to mind. I have a mental representation of a semi permeable membrane that helps me intuit about which way osmotic pressure will push fluid in a given system. Some other useful mental models: SCP cognitohazard (to think of/perceive a cognitohazard is hazardous), mental models of triangles are useful for estimating load angles when rigging heavy machinery, tenth thicknesses are a useful model to determine how much radiation shielding is needed for a given radioactive source of x rem strength. Mental models can be very powerful tools, and the best part is that they have a very low cost of replication, being information. They exhibit the property of medium independence, being able to be replicated as a series of interactions that serve as the holding media of the information. Your brain holding the mental model of the item is an example. I have mostly pondered the mental models relating to straight lines and closed regular geometric forms. Help me ponder the orb.

Or bodies are in a constant state of getting older and undergoing collapse. I think that believing in the good old days is a reaction to getting old. I think that believing in some golden past is it reaction to our own bodily degeneration. Fear of our mortality is a powerful force, and I think that a large amount of people externalize/project that fear onto their perception of society.

I always use this command as $rm -fr and read it as remove, for real